Monday, March 13, 2017

Meltyblend Strawberry & Blueberry Chocolates

I know updating has been pretty sporadic while I finish up all this house-buying-business, but today I've got 2 reviews mashed up into one!

We've got Meiji's Meltyblend in, not one, but two fancy fruity flavors: strawberry, and blueberry!
I'm no stranger to Meltyblend products, and even though it's been a while, the packaging is still as lovely as ever.

This packaging looks quite high-end and mature for a grocery store candy, but only if you view it from the front. There you'll see lovely food imagery, metallic foiled accents, and snowy textures. Meiji skimped of the rest of the packaging, so the text on the sides and back are all a flat goldenrod color with a few scattered snowflakes which look far less impressive against the berry-toned backgrounds. Once opened, each box turns into a resealable serving dish, so you can easily share the individually wrapped candies inside, so this gets an A+ for functionality, and a B for aesthetics.

Inside each box are quite a few individually wrapped chocolates, and keeping with the theme, each flavor is wrapped in a foiled wrapper matching it's box.

Strawberry (pink): True to it's name, this tiny little chocolate cube started to melt to moment it hit my tongue. The chocolate has a creamy texture, similar to coconut oil, but a very mild flavor. It's easily overpowered by the strawberry center. (Which is rare! Normally chocolate overpowers everything!) The center is bright and tangy. To me, this tastes like it was made with freeze dried strawberry powder, and it's pretty darn awesome! Reminiscent of actual chocolate covered strawberries, or even strawberry ice cream! The chocolate notes are pretty weak, but I honestly don't care because the center is just that good!

Blueberry (blue): Again, the chocolate coating is very creamy, but this time the fruity center doesn't pack the same punch. This center is mild, with some deeper berry notes in the background, but overall this flavor highlights it's creamy texture more than it's flavor pay-off. In the end you can tell it's trying to be a blueberry chocolate, but it just falls flat.

The strawberry cubes are easily the best strawberry-chocolate product I've ever had from China, and with such a realistic flavor, I think they're definitely worth the nearly $4.00 imported price tag. The blueberry? Not so much.

My boyfriend is a big fan of the chocolate-covered Choceur Blueberry Açai Superberries I buy at Aldi each week, so I thought I'd bring these over to see what he thought. I assumed that he'd really dig these blueberry cubes...but he was underwhelmed too! Now I know for sure this flavor is a dud.

Turns out, his nieces and nephews were going to visit that weekend, and their ages range from 7-18, so I thought it'd be interesting to see what they thought of these chocolates. (I had a bag of candy, so not to brag, but I was pretty popular with these guys.)

To my surprise, it was the younger kids that wanted to stuff these candies into their pockets to take home. The younger kids really dug the strawberry ones in particular, but it was the youngest in the group (age 7) who was really into the blueberry ones. Two of the kids said was that these tastes like strawberry ice cream, and I totally agree.

So, there we have it. Our small (informal) taste test proves that there is a clear difference between the two and only one is truly worthy of your money. The strawberry cubes are creamy, sweet, tangy, authentic, and refreshing. This is a HUGE step up from the artificial (and Chapstick-like) Meiji Apollo, and even though they're a bit pricey, I'll definitely be picking up another box or two.